04/03/2020
Its been about 1.5 years since my last post here. The World and EMB Films has been undergoing a lot of change, and I thought I'd let those that are interested know what we have been up to.
Mid-2018 we pulled out of our studio facility in Oakland and put much of our audio recording/producing and audio-post work in moth-balls. This was based on two factors.
1) the music studio industry has been killer hard to make a good living at, particularly for mid-sized facilities. Ultra premium studios will always have a place, but so many great tools and tech is available to anyone for not too much money its become hard to justify the costs for a multi-room facility, equipment maintenance, and upgrades to maintain relevancy. More and more audio post work is being done on a laptop or small edit desk.
2) after about 15 years sharing a recording space and equipment with another recording business, personality and style clashes made working together no fun.
So we took a hiatus from the audio world to reassess what we can do in that space.
On the Cinematography/filmmaking front, a similar re-tooling started around the same time. I’ve spent 20 years working in indie films as a freelancer, and have had a fair amount of success. But again, I felt the world changing around me. Having started to work with drones for areal cinematography, I expanded into mapping and inspection work. At the beginning of 2019, I took a full-time gig inspecting utility infrastructure for a large NorCal utility. That proved to be a very good fit for my skill-set and I was promoted several time to my current role as Operations Manager and Sr Systems Developer for a large drone inspection company. That was a crazy left turn for me, and not without some sadness at leaving indie-filmmaking in my taillights. But the rewards and challenges of being on the forefront of this emerging technology have made the transition pretty enjoyable for the most part.
On the Recording Studio front, we have just completed building a modest project studio with some choice gear that I believe is property sized for the business model we are pursuing. We can work at a very high level but without the huge overhead we had to support in our past incarnation. So I am very excited to announce that EMB Films v3.0 is alive and available for music recording/producing and audio post work! This is spearheaded by my business partner in crime Sr Recording Engineer, Winter.
For now, we are hunkered down, writing new songs and expanding our offerings as we wait for the the pandemic dust to hopefully settle. But we are able to work and record. So if you want to take advantage of this down time, give us a call and we can discuss how to work with the social distancing guidelines and still create inspiring music or scores.
I wish you all the best luck in weathering this difficult time.
Cheers,
Paul Nordin
Winter Jp Sichelschmidt
